U.S. to search for missing WW2 airmen in India (B-24 wreck "Hot as Hell" found, flew "the Hump")

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - In honour of the crouching, naked blonde painted on its nose, its pilot had named his bomber the "Hot as Hell".

But it was a freezing and stormy day as the American B-24 Liberator made its way across the Himalayas on Jan 25, 1944, flying what was known as "the Hump", perhaps the most dangerous route in air transport history.

It was one of nine American planes that went down that day as they tried to resupply China's besieged army in the city of Kunming, desperately trying to hold out against the invading Japanese during World War Two.

The Hot as Hell's crew of eight were listed as Missing in Action and later presumed dead. Its fate was a mystery the crewmen's families lived with for 60 years.

That is until Clayton Kuhles, an Arizona businessmen who spends his free time trekking through the mountains of north-eastern India in search of World War Two plane wrecks, found the debris of the plane in thick jungle on December 2006.

Kuhles has found the remains of nine planes in the remote state of Arunachal Pradesh in the past five years, doggedly logging his discoveries, informing American military authorities and posting them on his website (www.miarecoveries.org).

Now, after determined lobbying from relatives of the dead airmen, the U.S. military is finally swinging into action.

This month it announced it was in discussions with the Indian government to conduct a joint operation to search for some of the planes and bring the airmen's remains home.

"We were very, very happy to see that," said Gary Zaetz, nephew of the Hot as Hell's Navigator First Lieutenant Irwin Zaetz. "We would like them to do it some time this year."

By the end of the war, 650,000 tonnes of gasoline, munitions and other supplies were flown over the Hump, from north-eastern India across Burma to Kunming. On a single day in August 1945, more than a thousand round-trips were made across the mountains, carrying a payload of more than 5,000 tonnes.

With just a map, a compass and a radio signal to navigate by, the route, passing over 4,500 metre (15,000-foot) ridges, was so hazardous airmen also nicknamed it "the Aluminium Trail".

Many planes suffered from icing, some ran out of fuel, others lost their way in storms and simply crashed into the mountains. Rescue missions were mounted but with sketchy results.

The U.S. Department of Defence says than more than 500 U.S. aircraft and 1,200 crewmembers are still missing in the China-Burma-India theatre from World War Two, with 416 Americans missing in India alone.

But with so many more missing in places like Korea and Vietnam, its attention and efforts appeared to be elsewhere - until Kuhles entered the scene.

It all began, he says, with a chance comment from a guide while holidaying in Myanmar, as Burma is now known.

Hearing of Kuhles' interest in military history, he mentioned that a Kachin hunter had once told him about a plane wreck in the northern jungles, close to the Indian border.

Kuhles decided it would be fun to take a look, and off they set, interviewing the hunter, eventually finding the wreck.

"It was so remote I am absolutely positive no Westerner has even been to that site - or to any of the others I have found," he said. "Locals know about them from hunting trips, when they are looking for game animals or medicinal herbs."

The search then moved to India, where Kuhles relies on local guide Oken Tayeng to track down crash sites, most of them high in the mountains in almost impassable jungle in Arunachal Pradesh, where tales of the wrecks have passed into local folklore.

"We have known about the aircraft since were children," Tayeng said. "But most people think they are English planes, because for them white people mean English."

Tribal contacts and distant relatives have helped Tayeng trace the planes. He says he has information about at least five or six more for Kuhles to look into on his next expedition.

They found the Hot As Hell close to Tayeng's ancestral village of Damroh. The crucial tail number was missing, but another amateur military enthusiast, Matthew Poole from Maryland, helped identify the plane from serial numbers found on individual parts - a painstaking process in itself.

Zaetz had always been interested in his father's and his uncle's military careers. He was aimlessly cruising the internet when he googled his uncle Irwin's name in the summer of 2007. Up popped Kuhles' website, listing the entire crew.

"I was totally flabbergasted," he said. "Our family had always regretted we had never found out what happened to my uncle's flight."

It was Zaetz' turn to play detective, spending the next six months tracking down the surviving relatives of the crew.

Their parents have all died, but the pilot's 92-year-old sister, the co-pilot's 90-year-old sister, the bombardier's 95-year-old brother and his uncle Irwin's 88-year-old wife Ethel are still alive.

Then there are people like Susan Parham, who was engaged to be married to the plane's bombardier, First Lieutenant Robert Oxford and who still remembers the young man who took to country music programmes at the local school in Concord, GA.

"Our efforts are really time critical," said Zaetz. "We don't know how long these very, very elderly relatives have with us."

But it has been "frustrating" dealing with U.S. officials over the past year, Zaetz says, as he and his 83-year old father Larry tried to interest them in Kuhles' discoveries.

Officials from the Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action (MIA/POW) Accounting Command (JPAC) in Hawaii rebuffed them at first, saying the area, a disputed zone near the India-China border was too dangerous or too politically sensitive to explore.

But the Zaetz family stirred up Congress and the American press, and looks to have got what they wanted.

JPAC's commander, Rear Admiral Donna L. Crisp, is in New Delhi this week and is expected to announce an expedition will be mounted before the snows set in.

If remains are recovered, JPAC will conduct DNA tests on the bones to match them to records of the crewmen's relatives. All will be entitled to a burial with a military honour guard at a National Cemetery if relatives wish.

"We want his remains buried at the family plot in Burlington, Vermont," he said. "There is a marker for my uncle there in the Jewish cemetery, and also for Captain William Swanson."

Relatives Want World War II Victims' Remains [WW2- India-China theatre]
Associated Press ^ | 17 Dec., 2007 | Associated Press

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — The families of eight U.S. military men who died in a 1944 plane crash in the Himalayas want the Pentagon to step up efforts to recover their remains from the crash site discovered last year by a mountaineer.

Exactly what happened to the B-24 bomber dubbed "Hot as Hell," was a mystery for more than 60 years. It disappeared while on a flight from Kunming, China, to Chabua, India, to pick up weapons and other supplies and return to base in China.

Clayton Kuhles of Prescott, Ariz., a mountaineer who has made it his mission to search out crash sites along a route so deadly pilots called it the aluminum trail, found the wreck last December near Damrah, a village of 200 in northeastern India.

"I was so elated," Larry Zaetz said about hearing the plane that carried his older brother had been found. "To suddenly know that my brother's remains were within human reach, I just went through the ceiling."

But now Zaetz and other relatives say they've been frustrated by what they see as the Defense Department's slowness to send a team to India to retrieve crew members' remains.

Maj. Brian DeSantis, a spokesman for Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, in Hawaii, said he doubted such an effort would be launched anytime soon. He blamed political instability in the region and said the needed approvals from Indian government ministries, requested nearly a year ago, have not been granted.

"Once the area is deemed safe and we have the permissions, we'll follow up on this pretty quickly," DeSantis said.

Zaetz noted India is a U.S. ally, and he called reports of instability in the region out of date.

"I thought our motto was 'Leave no one behind,'" he said. "How can you treat military personnel like this? It's unbelievable. This is not to be accepted."

Larry Zaetz's son Gary was trolling the Internet in June when he decided to punch his uncle's name, 1st Lt. Irwin "Zipper" Zaetz of Burlington, into the Google search engine. He pulled up Kuhles' Web site, miarecoveries.org.

"He reported he had discovered a plane wreck," Gary Zaetz said. "He'd also done some heavy-duty documentary research on the aircraft so we knew it had to be the one that belonged to the crew that included my uncle."

The Web site include 16 photos of debris from the plane, which is believed to have hit the side of a mountain at about 9,000 feet altitude.

"I knew I couldn't rely on the U.S. government to put the information out, so I put it up on my Web site," Kuhles said. "I was hoping some relatives of the crew members would discover the Web site, and bingo — that's what happened."

DeSantis said JPAC typically does up to 50 recoveries a year and plans them a year ahead of time.

"There are 88,000 people still missing from different wars," he said. "We can't go to all the places at once. We make decisions based on the best information we have."

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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1940729/posts

To: CarrotAndStick

Major Brian DeSantis states that instability in the area of the crash site makes a recovery mission difficult. With all due respect to Major DeSantis, this statement is not supported by the facts. The families have been informed directly by The Hon. Tapir Gao, a member of the Indian Parliament representing Arunachal Pradesh, the state where the crash site was found, that the law and order situation there is quite good. Furthermore, the US State Department’s Consular Sheet on India does not include the state of Arunachal Pradesh in the list of northeastern Indian states that are known to have experienced ethnic separatist violence.
Furthermore, there is no evidence to substantiate Major DeSantis’ claim that JPAC requested approvals to access the crash site of the “Hot as Hell” almost a year ago. In fact, it was only this past month that the families were informed by the US Embassy in New Delhi that the US Government contacted the Indian Government for the first time about this site just a few weeks ago. The families themselves contacted senior Indian Government officials in November 2007, and these officials confirmed at that time that JPAC had still not notified the Indian Government about the crash site, eleven months after Mr. Clayton Kuhles of Prescott, Arizona reported his discovery to JPAC. That’s the real reason why no approvals were forthcoming from the Indian Government. JPAC simply failed to notify the Indian Government about the crash site’s existence. Thanks to the US Embassy in New Delhi, the Indian Government was finally notified.

Gary Zaetz,
Nephew of 1st Lt. Irwin G. Zaetz, navigator of the USAAF B-24 “Hot as Hell”

6 posted on 12/31/2007 12:27:43 AM EST by garyz

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